Ruth Ann Fredenthal

Ruth Ann Fredenthal at StarkThis exhibition consisted of four apparently monochromatic oils, each about 5 feet square, plus a smaller oil of similar appearance.The colors are muted, seemingly gray ranging to mauve, and the rough oyster linen on which they are painted reflects the light slightly differently depending on the visitor's angle of view and the amount of natural light in the gallery. The works are unframed, and the canvas that bends over theedge of the stretcher appears to be a somewhat different color, though this may be an optical illusion.

In fact, however, the paintings are not monochromatic. Untitled #146, for example, is horizontally divided roughly in half. The top half is further subdivided into three equal vertical bands of different colors, while the bottom nail has two vertical bands. The other paintings have similar divisions. To speak of "bands,"though, is a misnomer, as the colors are so close in hue as to be almost indistinguishable. Moreover, the dividing lines between the bands are not straight; instead they swerve in and out like jigsaw puzzle pieces, making it doubly difficult to tell where one color ends and another begins.

Fredenthal's brush stroke is very subtle as well, with no Impasto to define boundaries. Such a description makes the works sound like a kind of optical test, and there is that air to the viewing. It's like being asked to distinguish temperature variations in a room in which one corner is kept at 70 degrees, another at 71 degrees and so on. With Fredenthal's paintings, the intense concentrationrequired to detect their Infinitesimal visual shifts gives the viewer a sense of heightened awareness, offocusing on the very act of seeing.

These works definitely take time to view—appropriately so, as it took the artist three years and more to make them In what spirit, I wonder, was the paintapplied to the canvas? In a Zen-like trance of "thereness"? With a matter-of-factknit-one, purl-two attitude? In any event, Fredenthal in these paintingsout-Reinhardts Ad Relnhardt. She's a painter's painter, with all that term Implies of integrity of artistic investigation and of complexity in apparently simpleformat. It takes a while to come to these works, and many will not feel compelled to make the effort. But for those who persevere, the seduction is there.

—Reagan Upshaw

Ruth Ann Fredenthal at VeraEngelhornWhat you see is what you get in Ruth Ann Fredenthal's paintings, but what you see is contingent upon now long you're willing to look. At first glance you're convinced that you've come upon some rather low-voltage monochromatic canvases in muted off-gray violets and blues. The hurried viewer, the one "making the rounds," might leave it at that. Those fortunate few who were clued in beforehand, however, orwho happened to catch a hint of a strange animation in the paintings' color fields and stuck around to gaze intently atthe works, must have found this to be one of the more rewarding shows of the fall season.

Large paintings from left to right:Untitled 133 (1988-89), Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66" x 66", The Panza CollectionUntitled 130 (1987-88), Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 60" x 60", The Panza Collection,(Villa Panza Museum, Varese, Italy)Fredenthal works with microtonalities of color, something akin to LaMonte Young's music. If you look at her paintings long enough, you'll notice that their surfaces aredivided into staggered rows of interlocking planes that fit together along softlyrounded interlocking edges that resemble chains of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The regularity and repetition of this curvilinear tongue and groove reads as systematic notation. And yet, even as you register the arithmetical structures organizing the work, you become aware of another element or "voice," that of light-filled color.As soon as you notice the difference in color temperature from one band to another, the interlocking planes begin to declare their separate indentities as primary and secondary hues. The gray panels open up into cloud banks of light.

One Person Exhibition, 1989, Vera Engelhorn Gallery, SOHO, NYC (Photo: WoWe)This transformation takes place in painting after painting, yet it's never quite the sameand is always a surprise. Once you see the color divisions, the graphic and spatialreadings of each painting fire simultaneously. The works have a strong object-quality as well. Because of the sidelong way their color is perceived—out of the corner ofyoureye—the paintings appear to advance a bit from their physical surfaces. Op artachieved something of this retinality, but it was much noisier about it and that one effectwas pretty much the end ot the story. In Fredenthal's work, by contrast, many ways ofseeing blossom forth from a modestly drab first impression. There is nothing inherentlyspiritual or symbolic about these paintings, grounded as they are in the phenomenologyof the concrete, but I can envision a chapel setting for a series of them.In their unobtrusive manner, they are miraculous.

—Stephen Westfall

Ruth Ann Fredenthal at the Clocktower

It is rare these days for an artist's first solo show to be a retrospective, but such wasthe case with Ruth Ann Fredenthal's debut at the Clocktower. A colorist of long standing,Fredenthal's work in this show spanned the period from 1973 to '80, years in which hergeneral structural and expressive goals remained the same, but particular compositionsand color concerns evolved.

Paintings from left to right:Untitled 48 (1976-77), Multilayered oil on Ulster, linen, 66" x 60", Private Collection, ItalyUntitled 70 (1978-79), Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66" x 66", The Panza CollectionUntitled 69 (1978-79), Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 72" x 66"Fredenthal's arena is the expressive and spiritual content of color. Each canvas comprisesa color she calls the "mass tone" of the painting, and one or more variations of that toneproduced by mixing it with tiny amounts of other hues. The canvases are square or nearlyso, divided simply into rectilinear sections. The sections join, as puzzle pieces do, withcurving, interlocking edges, so that the color sections seem to fit together naturally ratherthan simply abut. In the earlier works, the curves themselves were large and assertive,playful and almost imagistic. In works dating from the middle 70s and later, the curvesbecome very small in compass, occasionally less than two inches wide.

The regular, meandering curves of her jigsaw pieces reflect her debt to abstractionist PaulFeeley, with whom she studied at Bennington College. (Fredenthal painted all his woodensculptures, and executed the large Sculpture Court piece shown at the Guggenheim afterhis death). Though Fredenthal had painted curves before their meeting, it was he who ledher to clean them up and make them uniform.

One Person Exhibition - 10 Year Retrospective, 1980, PS 1, (Photo: Erik Saxon)Institute for Urban Resources, The Clocktower, NYCThis curving, interlocking structure, however, is nearly invisible in Fredenthal's paintings.After a few minutes of looking, the minuscule color differences among the sections of apainting reach the threshold of perception. Most viewers perceive only a few of her carefullypainted joinings and only some of her color variations. Many leave thinking they have justseen monochromes. Fredenthal is not overly disturbed by this; she's after the "whole" experienceof the colors, and emphasizes that the subdivisions are only part of the point. Her brush techniqueoffers virtually no evidence of touch, and the weave of the linen remains visible beneath the eightor more coats of oil paint she habitually applies; this textural uniformity adds to the integrated feelof the paintings.

Her colors evolve, in this show, from warm, sienna-based earth tones, resonant with ambers andflesh colors, to warm and then cooler grays. The paintings, engulfing the viewer, serve as fieldsfor the eye's own dancing afterimages. Two of the latest paintings are a mauve gray and a steelgray respectively, each with numerous but almost imperceptible subdivisions. No brushstroke givesaway the positions of her jigsaw joinings, and the intense gallery lights melt color differences away.

These paintings are to colors what chords are to music—complex wholes affected by but superior totheir individual components.